I found this project compelling and spent several months organizing and compiling it for several reasons. First is personal – this is about my mother before she was my mother.

She was thousands of miles away, both literally and figuratively, from the mother I eventually knew. Second, it describes one of the most pivotal times in American history, when the United States emerged from the debilitating Great Depression politically isolationist, but began the rapid transition from an almost insignificant military power to become in a short five years the undisputed world military and economic leader.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, which catapulted the United States into WWII, happened only a little over five months after Cecilia left Honolulu and the social milieu of military families that would be most affected. Third, Cecilia’s documentation of immediately-pre-WWII life in Hawaii is extraordinarily detailed and colorful and describes many places that I have had an opportunity to visit over the years.

I spent the summer of 1966, twenty years after she was there, in Honolulu in a summer job with the National Park Service Historical American Buildings Survey (HABS). [1] In subsequent years, I have visited four Hawaiian Islands, some several times and visited most of the places described in my mother’s letters.

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